So Easy... Who Can Do It?

“Geico.com… so easy a cave man can do it”- a popular advertisement phrase from Geico car insurance. Through humor, Geico depicts the cavemen in their commercials as African Americans or black people. Although at first glance, you may not believe what I am saying, which I understand, because I didn’t even notice the relationship at first until I read a blog on the internet about it and began to take a closer analysis on the subject.
A person watching their favorite sit -com on television is interrupted by a commercial break. Before they grab the remote to change the channel, one of Geico’s caveman commercials catches their attention: the caveman’s frustrated behavior from Geico’s attempts to use their quote, “Geico.com… so easy a caveman can do it”, as bait for viewers of all types and ages to buy their car insurance. The commercial appears to be a funny attention grabber- up until a deeper look at it is looked upon. The skin tone of the cavemen is fairly on the dark side. “But oh no”, one might say. “That’s nothing because Indians and tanned white people could look similar to that complexion.” We wonder again, “but wait… the texture of the cavemen’s hair looks somewhat akin to black people’s hair... There’s no other race with hair texture as African Americans’ for sure.” It is clear that the cavemen in these commercials physically resemble African Americans.

Throughout the Geico’s cavemen commercials, the cast of actors is almost predominantly white (unless you noticed the Asian woman walking past on the billboard commercial). There’s not one black extra seen or maybe Geico considers the cavemen as African Americans in the scenes. So why wouldn’t they put other black people in the commercial? They wanted the cavemen to stand out and they know by blacks and cavemen having similar attributes that would not have worked in the commercial. Between the therapist actress and the caveman dialogue, she tells the caveman that it is just a commercial. He asked her “well, what if it said, ‘Geico.com… so easy a therapist can do it’?” Of course that wouldn’t make sense, right? “Therapists are smart” the caveman sarcastically concluded. It neither makes sense for cavemen to be portrayed as dumb but playing chess and the piano in the same scene. It seems that Geico just chooses to be insulting to cavemen or black people really.
Geico could argue with us that even though their stereotyped cavemen have attributes as a black person, cavemen are not humans. So how could anyone come up with the idea to compare a ‘non human’ caveman to an ‘actual human’ black person? By definition from the American Heritage Dictionary, a caveman is ‘a prehistoric or primitive ‘‘human’’ living in caves’. From images, books, and animation, all cavemen we have seen sort of appear as the ones in the Geico commercials. A source from Wikia states that cavemen are from the monkey family. Even without that source, it is not hard for us to see that cavemen have features of a monkey from the three-dimensional eyebrows to the trademark mouth of the monkey family. Therefore, many people conclude that cavemen are from the monkey family, which could agree with Geico ‘non human’ theory. So yes, cavemen can be compared to monkeys, but check this out: In history and present day, what animal might one consider or familiarize a black person as: a monkey maybe? Try this exercise: Get on the internet. Go to yahoo’s home page. Turn search assistant on. Type ‘black people look like ‘and allow search assistant to finish off the phrase. What happened? Perhaps search assistant gave you ‘monkey, apes, and gorillas’. In the past, when racism was stronger than it is today, white people blatantly called black people ugly, dumb monkeys. There’s an image on the internet of a t-shirt with graphics illustrating a monkey with a banana and writing that says ‘Obama in 08’ (Obama is U.S.A 2008 presidential candidate).
With all this in mind, what is Geico is throwing at us? They are furtively portraying that cavemen equals monkey and monkey equals black people. Why would they do that? What does that have anything to do with helping their car insurance quotas? Let’s take a look.
In Social Problems by John Macionis, African Americans SAT scores are 300 below the average of Caucasian and Asian students (which two averages are around the same) with the Latino’s and non Latino’s trailing just behind the Caucasians and Asians (381-382). What does this say to society? African Americans are the least intelligent race making it harder for them to own a house, have an established career, buy cars and let’s not forget- obtain car insurance! Of course Geico know this. Is Geico just insulting a particular group of people? So why should they care if black people believe that they are portraying them as cavemen. That doesn’t matter to Geico because if the black race entirely found out whom their commercial cavemen really are, what would they lose? In their eyes, not much since African Americans would be on the bottom of the list of other races to obtain car insurance. Our opposers may argue with that statement claiming that education has nothing to do with anything. To back that up, they will say “it is seen in the commercial that the cavemen are playing chess, the piano, and talks rather good English. Those are all mind simulated and intellectual tasks.” If that is so, why does Geico use the quote “Geico.com… so easy a caveman can do it”? It is like they are making fun of them for being intellectual because if that is the case, is playing chess and piano also so easy a caveman can do it. Geico are on the lines of “yea, I see you guys are trying to educate yourselves, so we’ll just take away confidence by bringing you down”. An example of this is in the commercial where the anchorman and the caveman has a short dialogue, “How could it be offensive if it’s true…historically, you guys have struggled to adapt” the caveman responds, “Yea, right… walking upright, discovering fire, inventing the wheel, and laying down the foundation for mankind”. Since our definition clearly mentioned above states that cavemen are human, Geico might as well have said ‘Geico.com…so easy a Mexican can do it, or Geico.com… so easy an Italian can do it.’ In fact, that is what they are saying but just a little differently racial wise, “Geico.com… so easy a black man can do it.’ To push even deeper than that considering the cavemen/ black people are smart, what does that say about media in our society? It’s says that no matter how smart blacks may appear, due to prejudice, they still are dehumanized. They could have easily used other categories such as animals, careers, or even a baby due to a lack of maturity. At least in those scenarios no one could have been seriously harmed.
The depth of Geico’s cavemen commercials is not noticed enough by its viewers. Rather the commercial was unintentional or intentional by Geico, it may hit home for some African Americans. If we continue to view it as a familiar, regular funny, ‘Great news… I saved tons of money on my car insurance’ Geico commercial, then anything can manipulate our minds by negativity through humor. We would easily be able and persuaded to do anything others want us to do. We are smarter than that because it was just seen that we thought outside the box to sum up where appearance, education, and relation to other characters of cavemen was interpreted from maybe unconscious common prejudice and stereotypes. In a world today where we strive for unity, commercials like these only continue the furthering and separations of races.


RESORCES:
http://www.blackvoices.com/blogs/2008/06/17/barack-monkey-sock-monkey
http://www.halo.wikiua.com/wik/caveman
Macionis, John. Social Problems. 3rd. NJ: Pearson, 2008.
www.bartleby.com/61/55/c01/755500.html
www.yahoo.com

A Little About Me!

Hello! My name is Key’Anna Scott. I am a full-time undergraduate student at Wayne State University (WSU). I am a stay- at- home mother to my son, Martino Haywood Jr. Besides the time I spend with my son, I enjoy reading, exercising sometimes, going to the movies, entertaining friends, and of course, SHOPPING! I plan to graduate from WSU with a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Arts under Fine Arts. That’s my passion that I hope and pray to make a successful and interesting career from. Along with graduating and obtaining a satisfying career, I look forward to marriage and MAYBE one more child. Who knows?! So… anyways, I’m sure with many of you, critics and supporters, reading my writing above about Geico’s car insurance, caveman comparison, are wondering why did I right it and what did I accomplish from it.
Well, I am currently at the end of my semester for my fall 2008 classes, one in particular being English 1020, which has turned out far more interesting and enjoyable than I intended. Not only because of the interaction with my professor and peers, but because I have really been able to broaden my writing into a level beyond where I thought it could go. Now, I can take with me new writing techniques and rhetorical workshops that I have learned to make my papers extremely better than they would have been before. Even though the class focused primarily on rhetoric, the centuries-old study of the arts of persuasion, it went far much deeper than that term because we live in a world where almost everything we look at, read, and listen to tries to persuade us in some sort of form. It’s all around us in today’s world and tomorrow’s future.
Now that I have had the confidence knowing that my writing can always improve, I plan on putting strong effort into it every time I am given a chance, whether I am writing for school, a job, or something as simple as writing in my son’s baby book. Learning about rhetoric has been entirely beneficial for me because as a mentioned earlier, my career goal is to be a well- off Graphic Artist, which more than likely will deal with the world of advertising or at least persuading some type of person or image. Glad to say, I have gotten a glimpse of that side of the world through rhetorical writing and I only hope to learn more and push further.
English 1020 have taught and gave a peek of reality for things that could be expected out of many of our careers, especially mines. Rhetorically –wise, my learning and writing of rhetoric has been one of the factors that have allowed a lot of things to change around me. I now find myself finding some type of way to look at almost everything as trying to persuade me. It has sort of been like an amateur photographer’s experience; they’re so use to taking pictures that everything they see is seen as a picture. If you’re curious of the different types of projects that we’ve worked on dealing with rhetoric and important issues overall, check out my project links: Stay at Home vs. Working Moms and The Audacity of Hope. I’m sure you’ll enjoy them if you enjoyed my piece above. This may be the end of the term and the end of this class for me, but it’s the beginning of a whole lot more to come…

Analysis: Modern Racism Top Ten List

Before the civil rights movement, many decades ago, racism was very broad and open. Now-days, racism is not considered one of the biggest social problems, sometimes it’s not a problem at all to some people in certain matters. However, many groups, such as African Americans, still experience racism whether they’re conscious of it or not. Author Darryl James takes notice to that. Through his appeals to the audience, James commits to building his ethos by arguing that modern-day racism still exists amongst black people in his article, The Bride: the Black Top Ten: Evidence of Racism.
James entices his article to individuals that believe racism no longer exists. He creates a top ten list entailing things we see, hear, and sometimes encounter every day, yet overlooked, is racism in a modernized form. He starts out building his ethos implying that he has written many other top ten articles, but this one stands out more because racist have “placed their program on remote control” after convincing many people that racism isn’t no longer alive. Even though he gives ten, I will only analyze the ones that were appealing to me, as a reader.
Number one, Drugs and guns in the Black community, James recognizes that weapons and illegal drugs are always someway and somehow dropped into the black community, whereas it would be hard to find such things in non-black neighborhoods such as Beverly Hills or California. Once I read that, in the back of my mind I said, ‘hey, that is true because sad to say, if someone was asked a question such as which city has the most crime: Detroit or Illinois?... In seconds, they would pick Detroit because of stereotyped and terrifying images of the city which is kind of ironic due to the predominant race being African American.’ Even though James makes a strong point there, I believe he could have found more evidence to back up his most important claim, the first one! He could have mentioned something like how our government neglects certain communities and gives more attention to others, then giving the reasons behind that and etcetera. That could have made his argument stronger and definitely more appealing. James number three: Evaporation of after school programs and number four: More prisons/Less gang prevention I found interrelated.
In number three on his list, he implies that scholarship programs and other types of financial aid for poor blacks are under attack leading to few black men in college while number four is suggesting that racism is seen in more prisons and less gang preventions, as a result, leaving more black women and men in prison. The connection I see between the two is: maybe more black people are in prison because of fewer after school programs; with black communities, of course being mainly black, I’m sure it’s easy to manipulate their own kind and living under the same circumstances, into forming gangs. I can understand why James separated the two numbers in a sense, but to push for more reasoning in his argument, they could have been combined. I found number seven on his list to be quite interesting.
Diminishing of slavery's modern impact/Embellishment of other peoples' oppression. James makes a good point behind that claim. He recognizes that cultures such as the Armenians and the Jews have times when they revisit their past horrors with annual commemorations and remembering the Holocaust, but blacks are always urged to forget about slavery. I never thought of it that way and I don’t think too many others have either. He really appealed to his audience there.
While reading this article, I was wondering who is the guy and how is he coming up with such claims- did he research, was it just something on his mind, or did he just feel the need to make a top ten list on something. Weirdly, once I was done reading his article, it was a lot more stronger to me because noted at the end of the article was that Darryl James is a syndicated columnist and the author of three books and won a non- fiction award for one. With this being the first time for me reading this article and maybe the first for many other people, he should have established that part of his ethos somewhere in the beginning of his argument. Still, James brought up very strong claims in his list that I felt were interesting and eye- opening to read yet, I do think more reasoning could have been added to make his argument stronger. After all, you can’t be too hard on an article that’s created as a top ten list!

author of article: Darryl James

Resources:
http://www.blacknla.com/news/Articles/DJ10Racism.asp